A Funny Thing Happened ...

on the way to the computer room ...

I had just had some supper and was carrying a freshly-poured cup of hot coffee on my way to the front of the house to the small computer room.

As I was passing through the living room, Smokey our cat decided to attack my shoe laces. His siege on my foot placed right into my path.

There was a sudden "yowwrrr" as my foot and his body collided. The cat dashed off even as I tried to maintain my balance and not fall, all the time trying to hold onto the cup of hot coffee without spilling it.

I ended up spinning around and falling backward and in an upright sitting position in my reclining chair. I landed on the switch which activated the motor and it began tilting the chair back.

Miraculously, the cup of coffee was still in my hand and except for a few drops running down the side of the cup and onto my hand, not a drop had been spilled on me, the chair or the floor.

I was returning the chair to the upright position when the cat decided that underneath the elevated footrest of the chair was a good place to take shelter. Except, I hadn't seen it go there.

With the chair upright and my feet on the floor I was about to set the cup of coffee on the end table next to me. There was a sudden "yowwrrr," not from the cat, but from my own vocal chords. Smokey, apparently still thinking we were playing, had reached his paw out from beneath the chair and had dug his claws into my ankle!

I jumped up, cup still in hand. Somehow, once again I managed to hold onto the cup without spilling it. Finally, I placed the cup on the table and moved to the center of the room and watched his paws groping blindly from beneath the chair.

For the moment he was trapped behind the foot rest of the chair. It was lucky that he had not gotten hurt by the mechanisms of the chair when the motor was running. It was also lucky that none of the coffee had been spilled.

"Bad boy!" I said to him. "You stay there for a while. It'll keep you out of trouble until I have my coffee."

Then I remembered that when I got home from work I hadn't had a clue as to what I was going to post tonight. I looked at the cup of coffee on the table and the gray paws digging at the floor and foot rest of the chair ...

Inspired by the incident I thought, what the heck. It was something, an anecdotal something to write about. So I fired up the computer in the next room and while the start-up programs were running I retrieved the cup of coffee.

There I sat, a maestro at the keyboard ... Okay, so it's not a symphony or a sonata produced by my fingertips. I happened to have the two black & white cartoons above in my files and I decided to craft the narrative around them.

Of course, there was still the matter of poor Smokey trapped under the recliner. I finished my coffee and placed the empty cup on the TV tray-table next to my chair. I pushed the button on the chair control and watched him dart to freedom.

He began to race around the room; into the window, onto the back of the chair, behind the couch. "Crazy cat," I said aloud.

I looked under the still-elevated footrest and wouldn't you know it, there lie one of his new toys - a catnip laced toy! He'd gotten as high as a kite while under there. He zipped through my legs and into the computer room. Then I a heard a crash!

The TV tray-table was tipped over and there was a large puddle of water on the hardwood floor. The empty coffee cup had landed in his plastic bowl of water. After grabbing a towel, some paper towels and a sponge mop, I cleaned up the mess and righted the table.

I put everything away and then refilled his water dish. Then I wondered, "Now, where is that little bugger?"

He was in the living room, stretched out on the back of the sofa. He looked at me as if to say, "What?"

When I was just about finished putting the details of the Smokey's misadventure on screen, I decided to check on him. He was still there on the back of the sofa, perhaps sleeping off the effects of the catnip.

Before I closed off this entry and before publishing it, I took a break to watch the final quarter of the Boston Celtics' game vs the Denver Nuggets. A few minutes later he moved from the back of the sofa and crawled onto my lap. He looked up at me as if to say, "That was fun. We should do it again sometime."

As he curled up in my lap purring away, I was reminded of the fact that "we don't own cats - they own us."

№ 1942